


icarus, point to the sun

by castelia



Category: White Collar (TV 2009)
Genre: Canon Backstory, Canon Relationships, Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-06
Updated: 2020-12-06
Packaged: 2021-03-09 18:55:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,906
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27921127
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/castelia/pseuds/castelia
Summary: Life as a criminal changes him. Being able to rappel off a museum roof—among other things— takes muscle, so they grow and strengthen. There is dried paint on his hands from forging his favorite paintings. He puts on a hat to complete his ensemble.He transforms. He becomes. Until gullible, naive Danny Brooks is dead.Confidence man.Neal Caffrey.(Or: Neal's life before, during, and after the anklet.)
Comments: 8
Kudos: 34





	icarus, point to the sun

Neal falls in love with the challenge first.

It’s always been his downfall: presented with the opportunity to use his mind and solve a difficult problem, he’ll do pretty much anything.

Pickpocketing careless classmates from seventh grade is not the same as cracking a safe, getting a forgery as perfect as the original work, planning a heist and improvising when it goes awry.

He sends champagne to the FBI agents trying to catch him in the van and laughs in the wind as they fail to do so, reveling in the feeling it gives him.

He falls in love with the challenge first. He falls in love with Kate second.

But his story doesn’t begin with Kate.

~*~

He was a boy, once, no different from the other boys living in Washington. His life there is everything he could have possibly wanted. Looking back, he doesn’t remember it, just vague flashes:

Attempting to tackle his father with a hug after he comes home from a long day of work;

Ellen’s red hair contrasting the blue sky;

His mother’s bright smile while she watches the sunrise;

Men in suits arriving in the dead of night, moving them away from Washington. He is three years old and doesn’t comprehend much of it.

“It’s called Witness Protection,” Ellen explains patiently. His father is gone. His mother is not smiling anymore. “It’s to keep us safe.”

“Safe from who?”

No one will answer him.

~*~

He is renamed Danny Brooks and relocated to St. Louis, Missouri.

“Your father was a hero,” his mom says. “But he’s dead now. In a better place.”

Ellen grimaces, but she says nothing.

~*~

Danny wakes in the middle of the night and goes downstairs, half asleep, and sits on the couch with his mom.

“Hi, honey,” she greets, warm and sleepy. “You’re his spitting image,” she says dreamily. “Your dad is the blue in your eyes.”

Later, he will run upstairs to the bathroom and try so hard to find him, but before he does something catches his eye.

“What’s that? It smells weird,” he asks, reaching for the glass on the coffee table, filled with an orange liquid.

“Not for you,” she says, slapping his hand away.

He’s small, and the house is so big, and so very empty.

~*~

He rarely ever sees her without the funny-smelling liquid again. Sometimes she’ll pour it in a glass. Sometimes she’ll drink straight from the bottle. It makes her happier. It makes her angrier.

If she doesn’t drink her eyes are void of any feeling. One day, when he’s nine years old, it drives him inside the pool hall he always passes on the way home, filled with people and color. A mischievous woman with sparks in her eyes teaches him how to hustle grown men. He has fun.

He comes home to eerie silence compared to the liveliness of the pool hall. It’s late, and he should eat dinner, but his mother is lying in her bed, eyes unaware of the world around her. It scares him. For a moment, he thinks she’s dead. He tugs and shoves until finally, she comes back to herself.

“Danny,” she says through gritted teeth, the way she sometimes says his name, as if she doesn’t like it. It doesn’t make sense to him; didn’t she pick it? Shouldn’t she like the name she decided on? “Go eat at Ellen’s.”

He wants to, but when he rings the doorbell she’s not home, working late. That night he lies awake in his bed and ignores the empty feeling in his stomach, wondering which is hollower: it or his mother.

The next day he asks Ellen to teach him how to cook.

Her eyes are, perhaps, a little bit knowing. “What’d you eat for dinner last night, kiddo?”

Danny doesn’t know it, but he will flash this brilliant grin many more times in his life. This is the first.

“Mom ordered pizza,” he lies. “It was really good.” ****

She doesn’t call him out on it. Instead, she gives him a key to her house.

"You can always come raid my fridge if you need to," Ellen says. "Even when I'm not home."

Then, she teaches him how to cook.

~*~

He grows more curious with each year that passes.

_How did he die? What was he like? Did the bad man get what he deserved?_

These are all questions he asks. The last one has his mom hurling a vase off the table. She’s drunk, of course. He takes care never to mention his father around her again. It must be too painful, he decides. To be married to a good man who sacrificed himself to save other peope. To be the one left behind. He can understand that.

He mentions his newfound knowledge to Ellen during dinner and her face pinches like she is in pain.

“You’re probably right, Danny,” she says, forced in the way his mother still uses his name sometimes.

He explains this away, too. Ellen was his father’s partner in the police force, after all, and must face the same grief his mother does. He shares this realization with no one.

He sketches his idea of his face. Most of the time it will be a man who looks like Danny, but older, with the same bright, blue eyes.

Sometimes, when Ellen is too busy with work (he is not her obligation, he is not her son; he knows that, so why does it sting so much?) and when he has to care of his mom as if he is the parent, he will sketch a face with much harder lines, a cruel twist to the smile, eyes hard and empty like his mother’s. The face staring back at him through the paper is the reason why he has this reoccuring thought:

_One day, one day—I’ll leave._

He crumples up the paper and tosses it in the bin.

~*~

He starts to get anxious on his thirteenth birthday, still plagued by dreams of leaving the Marshals and his near-catatonic mother behind.

It’s a classmate of his that helps him find his sense of purpose. Shawn has the best videogames and a house the opposite from Danny’s; warm and inviting. But he knows from experience that looks can be deceiving, every time that he cries or fumes or despairs behind the biggest grin he can manage.

Shawn, too, has a facade, and it’s this: his dad passed away during a bank robbery. They bond over not having a father, and not for the first time, Danny is angry at the unfairness of the world. Danny’s father was selfless, though. He saved people like Shawn’s dad. Danny wants to be like him.

The first time he tells Ellen he’s gonna be a cop, she almost chokes on the water she is drinking.

He doesn’t tell his mother at all.

~*~

His mom starts having people over at the house, men who eye her hungrily and follow her to her bedroom. Their house has thin walls. He presses a pillow over his head in frustration, falling asleep to old fantasies of living with Ellen instead.

The next morning, the beefy man is at their table, eating a slice of pizza for breakfast like he belongs in the void space they call home.

“Danny, this is Paul. He’s an artist.” There is a spark in her eyes, but it’s all wrong. He almost prefers the emptiness. There is a tinge of bitterness as well, that random men can be artists but she hasn’t looked at one of Danny’s drawings since he was five. “He’s doing a piece on me.”

Danny picks up a slice of pizza, but it is not the grease that makes his stomach turn. Paul grins, all teeth. “Your mother is an amazing woman. You’re a lucky kid.”

“He’s going to be doing me all week,” she adds smugly.

He makes a face because he is old enough to understand innuendo now. “Great,” he mutters, injecting as much sarcasm in the word as he can while still trying to be subtle.

From the narrowing of Paul’s eyes, he fails on the latter. He smiles a ‘Who? Me?’ smile that he hasn’t yet perfected, but situations like this is where he practises.

The next time he sees Ellen he begs and begs and begs her to teach him how to use a gun, until finally, she relents.

~*~

He turns eighteen. Everything is a lie.

He had almost been on the cusp of achieving what he had aspired for since he was thirteen and it is Ellen’s breaking point; words flow from her lips about corruption and murder—it is not his mother who owns up to the story she spun. It’s Ellen, but that just hurts _worse_. She lied to his _face_ , about something so important, something he had staked his entire identity on.

Not that he even has one anymore.

He had known that Danny Brooks was a fiction created by the Marshals when he grew older, but learning that his real name is Neal Bennett leaves him with a nauseous feeling in his gut, knowing the truth about the man who left him the name.

The Missouri air is suddenly too thick. He is choking on every time his mother and Ellen heard him speak of his heroic father and didn’t own up to the deceit it was. He is suffocating on that empty house and years of neglect, on the slightest bit of pity in the stoic Marshal’s eyes that he never understood until now. He wonders if this is what drowning feels like, and knows that he is doing it on dry land.

Ellen tells him what his mom’s name used to be, before circumstances broke her into a shell of her former self. He thinks about the satisfied tilt to her smile while she watched the sunrise, so content, the only memory he has of her from before.

The sick feeling dissipates somewhat when he erases Bennett and replaces it with that, with her old maiden name, with Caffrey.

He confronts his mother about all her lies. She’s drunk and quick to anger; before long they are both shouting at each other. 

He screams at her that he is leaving and never, ever coming back before slamming the door shut, leaving St. Louis behind as nothing but a memory he refuses to look back on.

~*~

He has on him exactly two items from his past: a pager for emergencies Ellen insisted he took with him and a worn sketchbook.

Wherever he stays, he does so temporarily, always on the move, always on the run. There is more than one way to drown, to be confined. Is this truly freedom, he wonders, or is it loneliness? He never allows himself to dwell on it. He cons someone with a well-practised smile and a whole lot of charm and the feeling he gets from it is a good enough substitute for whatever is missing.

~*~

New York is beautiful in its chaos, and the first place he stays for a more than a few days after fleeing from the truth. He lives there on and off, always coming back to it because it is his favorite place. Before the complicated heists and schemes, before his natural talents have become skills he has cultivated, he does street cons. Always alone, never with a partner.

The first time Neal meets Mozzie he shuts the door in his face. The last time Neal sees Mozzie he’s holding a gun and urging him to run, a plan in his mind that will leave his best friend devastated.

In Paris, he sees someone do a street hustle with follow the lady. He keeps walking.

~*~

A lollipop becomes research because know thy enemy and all that. Research becomes birthday cards.

Mostly, he does it for laughs. An FBI agent receiving birthday cards from the criminal he’s trying to catch? He thinks it’s hilarious. But a smaller, lonelier part of him, knows it’s not the only reason.

~*~

Life as a criminal changes him. Being able to rappel off a museum roof—among other things— takes muscle, so they grow and strengthen. There is dried paint on his hands from forging his favorite paintings. He puts on a hat to complete his ensemble.

He transforms. He becomes. Until gullible, naive Danny Brooks is dead.

_Confidence man_.

_Neal Caffrey_.

~*~

Neal falls in love with her between their first meeting and the moment they realize they have lost everything, but it’s not until after that he realizes how _much_ he loves her.

They just fit. They work well together, pulling cons and pretending the crappy motel is the height of luxery in the Côte D’Azur. She gets him in a way no one else has ever before, and it’s a good feeling.

He falls in love with her over daily routines, over take-out and the way she looks at him when he exaggeratedly flirts. He falls in love with her because he blinks and she’s still there. He falls in love because even Mozzie likes her, because she is beautiful and kind and unlike anyone he has ever met.

He falls in love with Kate quickly, easily, and never stops falling.

~*~

When Keller is not Keller yet, just Matthew, he shoots a partner just because he reached in his pocket.

Neal is a criminal, yes. He lies and steals and he _likes_ it. He knows how to use a gun, practised countless times with Ellen in the gun range while she taught him everything he needed know, but somewhere along the line of finding out the truth and running away from it, he has begun to dislike guns.

He’s no killer, and he will never be that type of criminal. He will never turn into his father.

~*~

After Vincent Adler, he makes sure to always be one step ahead of whoever he’s dealing with. It takes a certain amount of mental energy, to always be the smartest guy in the room, to know just how to manipulate a situation or a person into getting what he wants.

When he kisses Kate, none of that matters and all the things he should be worrying about don’t exist. It is his weakness, he can admit to himself. It’s how he gets caught—not caring about the FBI when he should have, just to see those gentle eyes one more time, just to feel her soft lips pressed against his.

“Thank you,” he says to Peter during his arrest, and he means it. Because of their ploy to catch him he got to hear Kate say the words _I love you, too_. She’s worth a lifetime in prison, but even four years is a long time to ask a girl such as her to wait.

~*~

“One year,” she murmurs softly from behind the glass that separates them. This is penance for his crimes: to see Kate, but to never truly be with her.

Every visit, he wonders. When will she stop? When will she regret? When will she cut her losses and move on?

This is not that visit.

“It feels like longer,” he says. “How are you?”

“I miss you,” Kate says. “You shouldn’t be here, wasting away.”

He smiles wryly, a ghost of how he used to tease her. “Come on, do I look wasted away to you?” He waggles his eyebrows for good measure, pulls an exaggerated face until she laughs. God, he loves that sound.

Her laughter stops as quick as it came. “Mozzie blames himself. For your arrest.”

Neal sighs. He’d been expecting that, a little. “Tell him I don’t. Seriously, I wanted to see you, he’s just the one who gave me the tip. I knew full well the risk I was taking.”

“I’ll tell him.” Kate nods, but her features are still conflicted.

“What about you?” he prompts, voice soft.

“You came back for me,” she says, averting her eyes. “You’re here because I left.”

“Hey, Kate, come on, look at me,” he urges, until she does. “I’m here because I love you, but not because of you, understand? It’s no one’s fault but my own. I should’ve been less sloppy.”

“You got caught by the FBI,” she says, smiling, letting the mood lighten. “You’ve lost your edge.”

“Three more years,” he says, but what he doesn’t say is that that sounds like an eternity. He hates prison. “I’ll get it back.”

He’ll get it all back.

~*~

It takes longer than he would have expected, but sure enough, when Neal only has a few months left on his sentence, Kate says she can’t do it anymore. The expectation doesn’t make it sting any less.

She’s still worth it, though, so of course he breaks out of Supermax.

But she is gone, not yet in a way that is permanent, unreachable nonetheless. He ends the ordeal with a tracking anklet and a job working for law enforcement. Deep inside him an old part of himself he hasn’t been able to kill cringes at the irony.

~*~

Life slides into a new routine. Instead of pulling cons, he’ll go undercover. Instead of checking into hotels, he’ll step off an elevator on monday morning. He still gets to plan heists—show the feds how he’d pull off the crime, but without the threat of prison looming over him.

He likes it more than he had expected.

“Of course you do,” Jones—who was there when he was arrested but doesn’t look at him with contempt like some of the other agents do—tells him. “You’re living the dream on an anklet.”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” he says mildly, before gesturing to his leg underneath his desk. “You wouldn’t believe how this thing chafes.” 

“Amazing house,” he lists, not having it, “nice landlady, good job, and oh yeah, you’re not in _prison_. Sounds pretty good to me.”

“You jealous?” He grins, tossing up his rubber band ball before catching it again. “We could switch, I’ll have my freedom and you can have all those things.”

“Really,” he says, deadpan. “And what would you do with your new-found freedom?”

He opens his mouth, then closes it again. Because he doesn’t know the answer, beyond that he wants it to involve Kate. But what will they do? Will they pull cons like before? Or will they settle down somewhere nice? His mind flashes to the stolen ring in the park.

“Not get caught by you guys, for starters,” he says, smiling brightly to make up for that moment of hesitation.

Jones shakes his head. “As long as you do stuff that’s gonna make us come after you, Peter’s gonna catch you.”

~*~

“I can’t believe you chewed out Agent Rice like that in front of the whole office,” he says, sitting across Peter’s desk, who looks vaguely embarrassed.

“How do you know that?” he demands.

Neal gives him a pained look that he hopes conveys what a stupid question that is. “You _shouted_. Everyone heard.” He teases, “I asked one of the agents and they gave me all the juicy details.”

Unexpectedly, Peter doesn’t make a quip about that, his face morphing into anger instead. “Agent Rice deserved it. Ransoming you off like that…”

“The situation turned out okay,” Neal says. “Lindsay is fine, and so am I.”

“It shouldn’t have been a situation in the first place!” snaps Peter. “You could’ve gotten killed.”

For a moment, Neal doesn’t know what to say, but thankfully Peter is too distracted thinking about what happened to notice. Sure, he and Peter have become friends, he has trusted him with his life, even, in that comic book vault. But this blatant concern for his wellbeing is just not something he understands. It all turned out alright, didn’t it?

He masks his taken aback expression with a smile, of course. “Peter, I’m touched,” he says, putting the right amount of levity in the sentence. “The con man and the FBI agent. Who ever would have thought?”

"I should’ve done more," he says, not having it. "I should’ve made sure…”

Made sure of what, Neal doesn’t know, because Peter lets the sentence hang in the air. Neal doesn’t know how to tell him that the fact that he cared at all is a novelty for him.

(Alex is allure, a siren call of the life he left behind. They are constantly trying to out-con each other in a delicate dance, but when it counts, they have each other’s backs.

Once, during one of their cons, he has access to the Marshal’s database. It’s too tempting. He looks up Danny Brooks, and finds out the only one who bothered to file a missing person’s report was the principal of his high school. When his mother was questioned by the police, all she gave them was that apathetically blank look in her eyes, and nothing more.

Kissing Alex doesn’t quite make him forget the way kissing Kate does, but he pretends that it does, her earthy perfume tickling his nostrils.)

“You did enough,” Neal says firmly, and that’s the end of it.

~*~

Kate’s favorite wine is port, and she pours it gratuitously into the empty bottle of Bordeaux, their promise of a better life.

She always had a penchant for sweet things.

~*~

It’s a clear and sunny day while they’re at the hanger bay.

He has never let himself go to pieces like this before, sobbing and shouting and trying to run into the smoldering flames to join with Kate’s ashes, but he doesn’t care.

By the time officers—he doesn’t know if they’re Marshals or FBI agents—arrive at the scene, his breakdown has already ended. They take in the destruction with a sharp glint in their eyes and cuffs in their hands.

“We’re here to take Neal Caffrey back to prison for trying to escape,” they say. It’s gotta be Marshals, he thinks in the back of his mind. He’d know that stoicism anywhere, grew up with it. He doesn’t care.

All he feels is numb. All he can think about is that split second of seeing Kate’s face through the window, her blue eyes, her small smile. How it must have _felt_ to be caught in such an explosion, to die like that. How he turned his back on her in her final moments, literally.

“He wasn’t trying to escape!” A voice as sharp as a whip cuts through the haze. He has never seen Peter look so angry. “OPR agent Fowler cut a deal with him. He said it was legit.”

“Please calm down—“

“You cannot take him back to prison for this! That was his girlfriend who just died, have some damned decency!”

“For all we know, he killed her,” the fed up Marshal snaps. “We need to take him into custody until this matter is fully investigated. Step aside, Agent Burke.”

It’s all background noise. They really think he killed Kate. He doesn’t care. None of it matters, because she’s dead.

There’s a sudden weight on his shoulder, almost similar to the way Peter held him after he held him back from running into the fire.

“Caffrey…” Speechless Diana—a rare thing. When did she get here? “There are no words. But I promise we’ll do our best to clear your name. We know you didn’t do this.”

He doesn’t respond.

He doesn’t care.

~*~

His story doesn’t begin with Kate, and it doesn’t end with her, either.

~*~

Succesfully pulling off a con was the sun at the center of his universe. Without it, he doesn’t feel like himself. Where there was once fire and challenge, there is now calm water, somehow just as challenging, trying to keep it from flooding the shore.

His movements are restricted by a two mile radius and he has a handler able to see where he is at all times, yet he is not drowning.

_What is confinement?_

Kate is dead.

Fowler is against all odds not responsible for it but Neal almost kills him, almost crosses a line he swore he never would. If Peter hadn’t been there to talk him down…

Neal pushes the bullets off the table. Neal cries.

He continues the search for whoever would kill someone so wonderful.

_What is freedom?_

~*~

“He’ll pull through, darling. You know he will.”

He lets out a shaky breath. “No. I don’t.”

“You should get some rest,” June coaxes, but he can’t take his eyes off of the sight of his lifeless best friend.

“I won’t be able to sleep.”

“Get some rest, anyway,” she says. “You’ll be no use to him if you’re too tired to bring whoever did this to justice.”

June always does know exactly what to say.

He falls asleep to the steady beeping of the ECG machine in Mozzie’s hospital room. 

~*~

“You were like a son to me,” Kate’s killer says before he dies.

~*~

_You’ll thank me_ , reads the note.

A room full of treasure, but as time goes on, he’s not feeling particularly grateful.

~*~

“You did not wink at a judge before doing a free fall into the awning of someone’s bakery,” Sara says, gesturing animatedly, the champagne in her glass sloshing with the movements.

“Hey, I bought that bakery,” Neal protests, “it was my bakery.”

“Why’d you buy the bakery?” Her eyes sparkle with mirth. “Do you still have it?”

“Of course I do,” he says matter-of-factly, in his _what do you take me for?_ tone he usually reserves for Peter.

Sara laughs. “Are you serious?”

“Sure, everything runs smoothly without me, but every once in a while I return and bake something. Usually when something’s bothering me and I don’t want to be here.”

“You stress bake. You actually stress bake. The things I’ve learned about you tonight…”

“At least you didn’t learn I have an ex-fiancée who loves martial arts.”

“Will you let that go?” she says, exasperated, before lifting an eyebrow. “Heights?”

“Heights,” he confirms. “They’re my favorite stunt to pull if I get an opportunity for it. Don’t tell Peter, it drives him crazy.”

“I bet.” Her lips curl into a fond smile. “You are ridiculous. But that’s what makes you….you.”

He ducks his head to the side, smiling. Sara is witty and he has fun with her, feels _good_ when he is with her in a way that is so refreshing. There's no complicated con dance like with Alex and there's no fear that she'll disappear on him like with Kate.

“You want to hear about the time I jumped off a skyscraper?”

“Now you’re just making stuff up,” she accuses.

“I had a parachute,” he assures. “So, here’s how it started…”

They talk until the sun comes up.

~*~

The opportunity of the score of a lifetime has presented itself. He goes along with it at first. _If I’m a criminal_ , he thinks—mind flashing to the accusations made when he didn’t even have a clue about what Mozzie had done, and yet, Neal was the first person on Peter’s suspect list— _I might as well_ be _a criminal_.

But the truth is, he doesn’t want to retire on an island. He wants to solve cases with Peter, have dates with Sara, drink italian roast coffee on the balcony with the beautiful view. He wants to stay in New York. Continue living the dream on an anklet—preferably without the anklet part, if his sentence gets commuted.

Peter gives him the signal to run and Neal doesn’t look back.

~*~

On the island, they have nothing but time. The first night, he gets horribly, embarassingly drunk. He tells Mozzie—who calmly and wordlessly gets him home and makes sure he has a bucket when he pukes—it’s to celebrate their retirement. From the look in Mozzie’s eyes, he doesn’t believe him.

“I wanted to forget,” Neal admits later in the warm, night air.

“I figured as much.”

Maybe it’s because he’s drunk, or maybe this has been building up the moment Neal decided to lie about the manifest, but— “You didn’t ask me, Moz.”

Mozzie looks at him, confused. There’s fuzz on his face, the beginnings of a beard. “Ask you why you drank?”

“Ask me if I wanted this, any of this.” He gestures at their surroundings. “You just used my paintings and implicated me and stole the treasure, assuming I was okay with it.”

“But you’re Neal Caffrey,” Mozzie says as if it’s obvious. Maybe it should’ve been. Maybe that's exactly what it shouldn't have been. “You’re a con man. It’s just who you _are_.”

“You didn’t ask,” he says softly, the warm buzz of alcohol still in his system. “Do you know how hard it is to be stuck between two friends, both pulling you in a different direction? It sucked, Moz.”

Mozzie doesn’t reply, and the morning afterwards, Neal doesn’t remember the conversation. There’s something in the way Mozzie looks at him, though, something guilty and raw. Neal doesn’t get drunk in Cape Verde again.

~*~

He spends his nights half-awake, half-asleep, wishing that he could look out the window and see the city lights in the streets of New York.

Neal instead paints _Girl with a Pearl Earring_ outside until the sun creeps over the horizon.

~*~

He thinks about Peter’s warm welcomes, thinks about Jones’ easy friendship, thinks about Diana who nods at him when they meet for drinks.Diana who toasts his return with him and says gruffly that it wasn’t the same without him. June who takes him to art exhibitions, poetry readings, movies; all within his radius, her face still lighting up when he wears one of Byron’s suits. And Sara, the insurance investigator who once called him a sociopath, who kissed him when he returned the Raphael, a painting he stole for Kate but led him to her. The way they slide into a casual no-strings-attached relationship upon his return.

He thinks about all of those things, lying in his familiar bed in his familiar apartment.

It’s good to be back.

~*~

He doubts it’s real until he sees Ellen’s body. He had hoped that maybe it was a plot concocted by WitSec to protect her, something, anything other than this. Unforgiving, there lies a corpse on the table.

Neal wants to say something but he chokes up. _I’m sorry. I love you. You were always there for me. I never would have survived my childhood without you. I’m so sorry._

All he can manage is a hoarse, “Goodbye.”

~*~

"You show me you're better than this!" Neal demands, his voice trembling. "You show me you're a decent man!" 

History repeats.

~*~

Things gather around them that summer, ache and distort, break apart.

And then, out of nowhere, Peter stands outside Neal’s door.

It’s a first since he got out of prison. Which seems like a bad omen, so much so that he almost hesitates to open the door thinking _it’s bad news he knows what I did he got out of his orange jumpsuit just to get me in one_.

“I thought since we’ve both been there, we could start a club.” Peter has gotten thinner in prison and his eyes are almost red. He doesn’t need to specify what ‘there’ refers to. “I brought beer.”

He holds up a six pack. Neal feigns a grin.

“Oh, yeah, totally,” he says, trying to conjure up a little more enthusiasm than he feels. He thinks about the painting and alone-time he had planned. He thinks about the guilt he still feels, even when Peter is free now, because he never should have been in a position where he wasn’t.

It’s a strange night, neither of them quite looking the other in the eye for different reasons.

They move sit down at Neal’s table and drink the first beer.

“Bet it’s nice,” Neal says to fill the unbearable silence. “Being able to shower alone in a normal bathroom again.”

“Yeah,” Peter says, relief in his face at having something to say. “Yeah, first thing I did when I got home.”

Neal takes a mouthful of beer when the silence returns, barely refraining from scrunching his face up at the taste. He prefers wine.

“Yup,” he says, long and drawn out. “I’ve been there. June letting me rent this apartment was my saving grace, but before I did anything—y’know, take stock of Byron’s suits, or get my _alleged_ go-bag into place—first thing I did was take advantage of the incredible shower.”

“Neal, I’m sorry,” Peter says all of a sudden.

He blinks. “Sorry?” he says stupidly.

“I wasn’t there that long and I felt like I was going to go _crazy_. I put you there for _four_ _years_.”

This is…unexpected. And completely ridiculous.

“You were innocent,” he says. “I wasn’t. Besides, first couple months are the worst, after that, you get used to it. Come on, Peter.”

Peter lets out a breath. “Yeah, you’re right, it’s just—“

“I get it,” he says. “You just got out of prison. It’s an adjustment period.”

“It is,” he says, before holding up his his bottle. “To us. For making it through prison.”

There are many things Neal wants to say to that. How different it is. How Peter should not be sitting here, sharing comraderie with him, because every bad thing that has happened in Peter’s life these past few years can be directly traced back to Neal.

“To us,” Neal toasts with him instead, hating himself a little while he does.

~*~

As promised, Sara sends him a postcard.

_Amis amants_. _Friends who have fun. When your sentence is done maybe we could have some more._

It’s a blatant invitation to join her in London, but he’s starting to wonder if his sentence will never be done. Too big of an asset to the FBI, they keep telling him. But if he hadn’t done his best to be that asset, he would’ve been sent back to prison. The game was rigged from the start.

The commutation hearing, and Kramer trying to get Neal to work for him in DC permanently. Deals for his freedom, always falling through.

What is confinement? What is freedom? Not for the first (or last) time, Neal considers these questions.

Going with or without the anklet is too simple an answer.

~*~

WitSec and realizing she was married to a horrible man changed his mother. Looking back, he knows now that her behavior was not normal, and that she had been severely depressed. The tendency to get like that is one of the things he inherited from her, like their ability to lie flawlessly to people they care about, but that is a bitter train of thought not worth pursuing.

The clearest example is when he was sent to prison immediately after Kate’s plane exploded.

He doesn’t like to look back on it. The only thing worse than being depressed is being depressed in prison. It takes away your appetite, and prison food is not all that enticing anyway. It makes you tired, when you need to be on guard, can’t show weakness to the other prisoners. He would lie on his cot, staring at the ceiling, not sleeping all night.

He knows himself well enough to recognize the signs that it is happening again. Maybe not as intense as last time, but still enough to be worried. In prison he would replay Kate’s face through the plane’s window before the sound of the explosion and the fire, over and over in his head. The moments he replays now are Diana’s call, James shouting at him, Peter in an orange jumpsuit. The endless symphony in his head of _my fault my fault my fault_.

He doesn’t let himself succumb to it; he has a job to do.

Neal atones by freeing him through methods he would not approve of and loses him as a handler for it.

~*~

After Neal gets Peter out of prison, things between him and Elizabeth reach an uneasy compromise. They don’t talk about the past. They don’t talk about the car accident or prison or that quiet fury in her eyes that shook him to his core.

She tries to apologize to him once.

Neal comes by the house one morning—not something he often does anymore, but Siegel died so he works cases again with Peter, and Neal came to share a breakthrough on their latest. It’s early, though, and he is upstairs getting ready, leaving him and Elizabeth in the living room, the silence awkward and stifling.

He looks up to see Elizabeth watching him, a strange expression on her face. “Neal, I’m sorry—”

“Don’t apologize,” he says quickly. “You were right about everything, anyway.”

“I know I was,” she says. “But that’s not—“ She sighs. “This _thing_ , it’s been building up, for longer than I’d care to admit. I thought it was the car accident, but, really, it was already happening before Keller. …I’ve recently started seeing a counselor.”

“I’m glad you’re getting help,” he offers.

“It helped me realize that the way I acted towards you was unfair. I shouldn’t have told you to lie to Peter after all you two had been through, and… When he was arrested…”

“For a murder my father committed. Someone I let into our lives.” He holds her gaze. “Don’t apologize. I understand.”

She is still hesitant. “You aren’t angry?”

“Aren’t you?”

Elizabeth offers a small smile. “No hard feelings?”

The sheer _relief_ he feels at that statement should be ridiculous, but he can’t bring it in himself to care. It cuts through the numb haze he has been experiencing between James’ betrayal and Hagen’s blackmail, revitalizes him the same way getting justice for Kate had.

“No hard feelings,” he agrees.

~*~

For the first time since Sara moved to London, he is excited about someone again.

Rebecca is both naive and daring, bookish and savvy. He could pull her into the life, he thinks, teach her what it is to be a con artist. They could steal the diamond together, be happy together. There is a chance that she might go for it. But then he thinks about Kate, the way he pulled her into his life, a life of cons, and her fate at the end of it all.

He doesn’t know what he’ll do yet when he does, but he knows he and Rebecca, with help from Mozzie’s brilliant mind and Hagen’s threats, will find the diamond.

~*~

Rebecca is a puppetmaster. She knows which strings to pull.

~*~

For fifteen years, two people he trusted lied to his face. Ever since, he has made it a point to constantly be one step ahead: always the con artist, never the con.

Adler is an exception, but Adler dupes everyone, Kate included. It’s a blow to Neal’s ego, sure, but it doesn’t hurt as much as James or Rebecca.

Conned by his own father. Conned by a girlfriend who wasn’t really. Both of them murderers. He’s not sure which incident he hates more.

_Now you know how it feels_ , several people might be inclided to tell him but don’t, yet he can see it in their eyes. _Sucks, doesn’t it?_

What they don’t know is that he’d already known how it felt, that keen, deep sense of betrayal, aching in his chest. It startles a laugh out of him: that he has now been conned by both of his parents.

A family of liars. Deceit runs in his veins.

~*~

The cold weight of Rachel’s gun pressed against his temple.

“You have to stop running.”

~*~

Rachel helps him, in the end. Making the best use of her borrowed time, she says. “People like us end up in a prison cell, or dead,” she says.

He closes her eyes after she kills herself, mind flashing to all the different ways this could have gone down. He’ll try to remember her not as Rebecca, the persona she created to con him, but the real parts of her bleeding through. Her dreamy sigh when she didn’t know she was under surveillance. The unshed tears in her eyes when she lowered her gun. Watching the beautiful scenery together before she was arrested.

She has to be wrong about the inevitable end. For him, there has to be another way.

There has to be.

~*~

He finds it.

~*~

“We have flown too high.”

“One more flight,” Neal says gently.

Mozzie scoffs. “Said Icarus.”

~*~

Neal writes a dozen letters explaining his plan and burns them all.

He remembers Ellen telling him what Peter told her when Neal was in Cape Verde. He remembers Mozzie’s loyalty. He remembers what it is like to have people who care about what happens to him.

He remembers what will happen if he does not go through with this.

Neal burns letters by the moonlight on his balcony.

~*~

_What is confinement?_

“You’re the only one who ever saw the good in me,” he says, a scene he has set up, the paramedic an actress, the world a stage. “You’re my best friend.”

_What is freedom?_

The anklet is not chafing his leg anymore and the FBI will not come after him for it, but he is not free.

He has his answer.

~*~

In front of the Louvre, there stands a man with a fedora, drinking port straight from the bottle, his striking blue eyes eerily hollow.

“If you want a happy ending,” he murmurs, “it depends on where you stop the story.”

~*~

Freedom is being able to choose to go home.


End file.
